I'm a libertarian lawyer and college professor. I blog on religion, history, constitutional law, government policy, philosophy, sexuality, and the American Founding. Everything is fair game though. Over the years, I've been involved in numerous group blogs that come and go. This blog archives almost everything I write.
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Friday, September 23, 2016

Brayton on Federer's Recent Article on the Lutz Study

... The Lutz study, you may recall, looked at the relative influence of
various Enlightenment philosophers on American politics before, during
and after the founding (from 1760-1805). Lutz, a history professor at
the University of Houston, and his co-author took a large number of
samples of political writings from that period and counted up the number
of references in those documents to people like John Locke,
Montesquieu, Sidney and others.

There are two different versions
of the lie about this study. Some claim that this study looked at
documents from the founding generation, for instance. But Federer goes
all the way and claims that the documents being studied were not just
from the founding fathers, but specifically from the 55 men who signed
the Constitution.

....

... This study started with 15,000 documents, then pared that down to
about 2200, then finally to 916 documents that were actually included in
the sample. The vast majority of them were not from any of the men who
signed the Constitution, or anyone who is rightly considered a founding
father at all. They were newspaper articles, pamphlets (which was the
dominant means of communication in those days) and such. A full 10% of
those pamphlets were actually reprinted sermons, which was very common
then, and the overwhelming majority of the Biblical citations found in
those documents came from those sermons.

But that’s just the
start. The study also broke down those citations by specific time
period, including 1787-1788, the two years when the Constitution was
being written and ratified. During that time, there is not a single
reference to the Bible from the Federalists, those who were advocating
the passage of the Constitution. The only ones during that time period
who referenced the Bible were the anti-Federalists, who used the Bible
to argue against the passage of the Constitution.